MEMPHIS, Tenn. — It's been a year - they're still waiting for answers. Many wait even longer.
They wait for a phone call that, for many, may never come.
"It seems like it's just gone on a pile of other unsolved murders," said Wanda Heard, longtime friend of Yusef Shabazz.
Shabazz was killed June 2023 on a neighborhood street in Barton Heights. They still aren't sure what brought him to the area that day.
He had moved to Memphis cross off a bucket list item - work for Teach for America. After finishing, he began driving for rideshare companies and moving into entreprenurial spaces, Heard said.
A former federal prosecutor and judge, Heard has been trying to find out more about what happened to her friend, but information has been hard to come by.
"This whole situation, it saddens me greatly," Heard said. "But to have him die like that. They're not following up with family, even if you give us a status check, and let us know that you have not uncovered anything, or to let us know what you've been doing. So people don't think you just stop looking. I think that's at a minimum, respectful."
She recently reached out to his family again, but none of them have heard from Memphis Police Department officers investigating his case.
"I did speak to Akeel, Yusef's son last night," Heard said. "It's difficult for him to talk about it. He said to me, 'They're getting paid to do a job and all we want them to do is their job.'
"And I expressed that really all we want is justice. That's it. You don't want anything more or less, we want them to aggressively look for his killer."
A new backlog builds
As they wait, a new backlog is taking place - as Memphis homicides continue to rise to levels the city has never faced, a limited investigative staff struggles to keep up without more man power.
"Is it working out? Right now, this current model? No, it is absolutely not working out," one officer said.
The officer spoke under the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal relating to his employment. He works as a bureau investigative officer.
As Memphis has seen an increase in homicides over the past few years, homicide unit investigators have not received an increase in manpower to keep up.
"We've lost a significant amount of people because of promotions," the officer said. "If we have a scene like the Orange Mound shooting, where we had almost everybody out there, if we caught another homicide, we would not have enough investigators to go make that scene."
MPD and City of Memphis officials didn't directly say a backlog was occurring, saying that all cases are assigned to a primary and secondary investigator and all cases are investigated until all leads are exhausted.
Cases may become cold, but MPD has expanded its cold case team and no case is ever really closed until it is solved, according to MPD and City of Memphis officials.
A new shift was introduced to try and alleviate pressures, the 'Charlie' shift is a volunteer based night shift, but it doesn't run through the weekend.
"If you're now working weekends, you're catching two to three cases in that month that you're working weekends," the officer said. "So [the shift] just, it's not producing what they want it to. And we're still losing investigators."
The city's homicide numbers have nearly doubled between 2017 and 2023, with 200 and 399 homicides respectively, according to MPD data obtained by ABC24. With 2024 nearing the pace of the record-breaking 2023 homicide numbers.
While some officers noted to ABC24 that the unit is being burdened by heavy case loads, this officer took it a step further.
"From record keeping, to evidence keeping, to the amount of work that the caseload is, it is on par with the whole DNA scandal that we had six, seven years ago," the officer said. "Once the case goes cold, if it doesn't have any legs and there's no movement, they will take that case folder and they will shove it off in a closet, we got a room on the ninth floor where they put it off.
"And there it stays, there's no active scanning to keep copies in a database somewhere where somebody can pull up on a computer real quick. There's several times where we get tips on an old case, let's say three or four years old, and I go to try and find the records and nobody has a clue where that case file is and that's happened to me on numerous occasions."
Other officers who were contacted by ABC24 disagreed with this sentiment, but MPD and City of Memphis officials said that the room on the ninth floor is the storage room for all original documents and that some of them have been scanned in and some haven't been scanned.
The department announced internally how many sergeants are being promoted, which is 59, according to the officer. But they're not replacing all of those promotions between the first and second lieutenant.
"I don't know how they're planning to replace the numbers on that side either," the officer said. "I don't know where these people are coming from. But I know the big thing I see that concerns me right now is sustainability.
"If they're going to pick and choose the way they are, because you're getting a lot of people who are coming out of the squad car that have zero experience. So the first round, yeah, you're good. But now the second, third round? Are you going to be able to find people with that experience?"
That dilemma, tied in with the aforementioned problems facing investigators, is that there is little time to investigate homicides due to the amount of work.
"We now have more supervision that we didn't need, and that we don't know where to put these people at, which is taking up resources that we could be putting into actual investigators," the officer said. "The thought process and making these second lieutenants, wasn't very well thought out."
The officer said that five of the new second lieutenant rank officers have been assigned to the homicide unit. Those five have been hand picked because they do have investigative experience. But they aren't taking on any cases at the time of the interview with ABC24.
There is also the looming Department of Justice pattern or practice investigation. The officer said that DOJ officials have said that the current caseload is overworking the homicide bureau.
"And that's just a recipe for disaster," the officer said.
City of Memphis and MPD officials said the DOJ is in the middle of a pattern or practice investigation and not a case capacity investigation.
One of the biggest issues facing the department is older officers feeling betrayed by those in power.
"We finally made it [to] sergeant. That was the biggest hurdle and now we're going to get lieutenant and they slap us with, 'Well, you have to compete with everybody that you competed with before.'"
SECOND LIEUTENANTS
While the homicide unit has received new officers to their complement, the rank of second lieutenant itself has led to multiple lawsuit filings and complaints from officers.
The rank is currently the focus of an ongoing Shelby County Circuit Court battle between MPD and its' union, the Memphis Police Association.
That legal battle comes after an arbitration ruling from March 9, 2024. The arbitrator found that MPD officials violated the memorandum of understanding agreement with the MPA after creating a new field supervision rank, second lieutenant.
The rank circumvents prior eligibility requirements to become a lieutenant and allow officers a quicker pathway into management.
The new requirements are lowered to applicants with five years of service, no time as a sergeant and excludes officers who have received certain disciplinary actions within two years prior to the eligibility cutoff.
Those changes were never negotiated with the MPA, according to the arbitration judgment.
When siding with the union, the arbitration ruling was for the department to return to status quo and create a promotional committee to determine the path moving forward. That never occurred.
More than 70 Memphis Police Department officers have asked to join the lawsuit against the city and oppose the petition to vacate the arbitration award filed by the city in late March. That motion was filed by their attorney, Robert Spence.
Mayor Paul Young met with hundreds of police officers in January in a private meeting after taking office and said that he would abide by the ruling of the arbitration, according to a recording obtained by ABC24.
Young notes during the meeting that the field supervision rank is a benefit when it comes to the DOJ's pattern or practice investigation and could keep the city from being under a consent decree.
The second lieutenant position job functions reads that it, "Supervises and directs the work activities of subordinate police officers to ensure compliance with departmental regulations, policies, procedures, and federal, state, and local laws and ordinances," according to a document obtained by ABC24 dated Feb. 21, 2023.
Second lieutenants have shown to be moved into a variety of units across the Memphis Police Department, including Mayor Paul Young's own detail, not just on the street in field supervision roles, the main argument being used to justify the rank, according to special order documents obtained by ABC24.
VICTIM'S FAMILIES AND THE LONG WAIT FOR A CALL
MPD officials spoke to Memphis City Council Tuesday, May 7 for an update on things in the department, including a presentation on victims' services unit that, "provide[s] support and advocacy services to more than 1,200 families of homicide victims, including witnesses and other violent crime victims."
Council member Janika White noted that often, she has heard from victims who have been assaulted or shot. And frequently, they have not been given a lot of follow-up or update from MPD investigators on their case.
Interim MPD Chief Cerelyn 'CJ' Davis said that it should be the investigator that initiates those conversations on updates, at least according to MPD Protocols.
MPD's head of the investigative services bureau, Col. Caroline Mason-Beasley, reiterated that investigators are supposed to be doing those updates, but occasionally if an investigator is on vacation, they may not hear from them in a timely manner.
Council member Rhonda Logan said that she understood that was what is supposed to happen, but asked if there was a protocol in terms of every 30 days initiating a call with victims.
"That way we would know exactly. It wouldn't be, 'Well, some of them do and some of them don't,'" Logan said.
Beasley said it is taught in trainings and that is what is done.
"We do have those things in place. They're in place," Mason-Beasley said.
Shabazz's son said he has yet to hear back from MPD since a month or two after he was found dead.
MPD and City of Memphis officials said they keep track of contact with families or the significant contact person in cold cases.